Paperback | November 24, 2011

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After the late fourteenth century, English literature was fundamentally shaped by the heresy of John Wyclif and his followers. This study demonstrates how Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, John Clanvowe, Margery Kempe, Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate, far from eschewing Wycliffism out of fear of censorship or partisan distaste, viewed Wycliffite ideas as a distinctly new intellectual resource. Andrew Cole offers a complete historical account of the first official condemnation of Wycliffism - the Blackfriars council of 1382 - and the fullest study of 'lollardy' as a social and literary construct. Drawing on literary criticism, history, theology and law, he presents not only a fresh perspective on late medieval literature, but also an invaluable rethinking of the Wycliffite heresy. Literature and Heresy restores Wycliffism to its proper place as the most significant context for late medieval English writing, and thus for the origins of English literary history.

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Title:Literature and Heresy in the Age of ChaucerFormat:PaperbackDimensions:322 pages, 9.02 × 5.98 × 0.67 inPublished:November 24, 2011Publisher:Cambridge University PressLanguage:English

"Cole's book does a very good job of detailing the subtleties of Wyclif's own beliefs, those of his followers, and of the 'cultural conversation' that those beliefs spawned in writers from Chaucer and Langland through Hoccleve, Lydgate and Margery Kempe. . . . [T]he chapter on Kempe goes a long way to bringing that remarkable writer back into her philosophical and theological ambit and, in the process, restoring her historical meaning after many years of anachronistic readings." Times Literary Supplement